anyhow, if memory serves, the russian shuttle isn't actually better than the US version.
The Russian design is superior to the US design. Higher cargo capacity, better gliding characteristics and less thermal stress in reentry. The Russian engineers took a look at the US design and improved on several parts of it.
but you're right, the russian shuttle could certainly be used as a cargo carrier..
There would be little point in using the shuttle as a cargo carrier, simply use an Energia booster to put the cargo into orbit.
Of the Buran design, a total of 5 were built. Other than the one was destroyed, 3 are sitting disassembled outside the NPO Molniya factory where they were built, deteriorating in the weather. The remaining one is up for sale, but is *not* in any way a flightworthy vehicle, and absolutely could not have been converted as such in time to save Columbia.
So how long and how much would it cost to get one or more of these flightworthy.
One of the original design goals of the STS was that it would be able to repair satellites in space-- but very few satellite programs have taken advantage of this design feature.
Probably because it's cheaper to launch a replacement satellite. Especially since the shuttle is restricted to low Earth orbit.
Thanks for saying what I already was going to say. I have always been they guy who wants the best tool for the best job. If that was the way things worked with computers, Mainframes would definitely be used for Databases and all IO intensive processes and UNIX/Linux for Calculation intensive stuff and Windows for low end file sharing and print spooling as well as clients.
In quite a few cases the best tool for the job might be a terminal either text or graphics. I've seen quite a few situations where Windows machines do nothing other than run a maximised copy of Hyperterminal.
We're feeling the budget crunch too, and the purchase cost savings of open source is definitely popular with my managers, though they are concerned with "who will support it", well the answer is the same people who would be supporting the "vendor-supported turnkey apps" --- the city's own I.S. staff, because whoever the commercial software's "owner-of-the-day" (the companies are constantly getting bought out by other companies) is generally incompetant anymore.
Especially if you have the senario where your IS staff end up knowing more about the software than the people in the vendor's "hell^Hpdesk" call centre. With open source they actually have the source to examine/alter and typically some contact details for whoever wrote it in the first place.
....but changing over from a commercial vendor to open-source always carries with it a good deal of costs in converting user data, systems, admin training, etc.
As does sticking with a commercial vendor who likes you to "update" according to their schedule.
Strangely, there doesn't seem to be a Linux version. Or a Mac version, either. It's not so free when I'd have to buy a copy of Windows and spend 2 hours installing it, is it?
Also you probably need the "right" version of Windows in order to even insall the "free" MS Office viewer too.
In the cases of floor tilers and aircraft designers- yes!, they should be paid according to the number of people who will benefit from their work.
By that logic the people who worked on aircraft such as the XB-70 and TSR2 should never have been paid anything. With the designers on the Antanov 225 only getting any money for work they did nearly 20 years ago.If I build or design something that no one will ever use, I don't deserve any money at all.
Just because something is usless does not mean that no-one will buy it...
I don't deserve any money at all.
Even if you did it at the request of your employer or persuaded someone to pay you for it.
The more people that want to use it, the more cash I can ask for before agreeing to the job.
The operative word is "before". But no-one knows they actual value of the work until it is done.
The is the fundamental reason that free markets can be more efficient than central planning, because people doing a useless job automatically won't get paid.
How is this efficent? You don't know how much anything costs until long after the event. Also there is a need to keep paying people for work they did decades ago (or even their grandparents did decades ago.)
A "fair price" doesn't mean getting paid by the amount of time or effort put in- it should be the results that matter.
Why should the results matter? Should the person who layed a floor get paid according to the number of people who later walk on it? Should the designer of part of an airliner get paid x amount per passenger?
And, studio recording is a full time job- for somebody. If the "musician" just spends 2 days singing music that has been written, arranged, and accompanied by someone else, though, it's not her who's doing the job. But somebody's working, and needs to be paid.
Considerably more work (and people needing paying) is likely to be involved with even a fairly small concert. PA systems do not magically set themselves up or magically pack themselves away at the end. There is an audience who need to be looked after, kept safe and secure.
Note that I agree that major musicians should not earn as much as they do today from recordings, and that those who want more money should do live shows. But making shows their only means of income just isn't fair.
If they can't make a living from music recordings then maybe they should do something else with their lives.
It could be a moon that hit Jupiter a long time ago, or some giant crater under the layers of clouds. I bet that there must be a surface structure under those spots.
Impact events only leave signs on gas giants for a fairly short time. It isn't that long since the last time Jupiter got hit.
I think a more interesting question would be as to WHY the atmosphere is being yanked by the star?
The artists impression looks like a large comet. Most likely the atmosphere isn't being "yanked off" so much as erroded by the particles and radiation given off by the star.
There are some musicians who may compose beautiful things in their studios, but can't play in front of a crowd to save their lives. Should they be denied compensation for the music?
They should be paid a fair price for the work they actually do. Touring is more likely to comprise a full time job than doing only studio recordings.
Huge profits for music corporations or artists is not the baseline,
Whilst the music company may make huge profits it certainly isn't the majority of artists. Even supposedly "sucessful" artists have wound up bankrupt, insane or even in early graves.
Why should the music biz, at it now is, be immune from the vagaries of time and change, when whole empires and civilizations aren't?
The multinational music publishing industry isn't even all there is to the "music biz" anyway.
Do you think piracy is going to go away? Do you think that just because the content brokers are out of business, people will decide to give up Kazaa and other pirate-to-pirate (P2P) tools and start paying for their music again?
Without the middlemen taking their cut the actual creator has to sell far fewer copies in order to make a decent living. Nothing demands that they only sell pre recorded music, they can tour, play gigs, sell t-shirts. No requirement that people must make a living from making music anyway. For plenty of musicians it's a hobby. Making music and playing gigs is what they do to get away from their "day job". If music can cover the costs of their instraments and get a bit of spare cash that's welcome, but it isn't what motivated them in the first place.
Do you think college kids are going to stop sharing their music collections with anybody who wants to copy them?
They are more likely to pay the artist 50 cents a song than pay 20-30 euros for a CD where they only like a few of the songs (and the artist only gets 5 cents from anyway).
If the government didn't aid businesses sometimes, it could destabilize parts of the economy that they need to stay competitive in the world market.
This is like saying that you don't need welfare, because everyone should never have hard times.
Then why can't government simply say they are enguaging in "corporate welfare" for xyz reason?
Since this is something that's so hard to enforce, the government's just following the path of least resistance.
That would be to do nothing. If government is going to bail out a specific business or business model they need, IMHO, to justify to their employers. That the consequences of not doing so are likely to be worst than doing nothing.
Unlike most physical goods, the fixed startup cost is enough that it is very hard to get into it.
With many physical goods you have to design not only the goods themselves but also machines and systems to produce those goods. Even where you do have costs like movie sets they don't need to be durable enough for hundreds of thousands of uses.
Peter Molyneaux wants gov't support, because Black and White took too long and wasn't bought by enough people. EA may be able to take the write off, since they produce games each year that have profit margins to cover it (NBA Live 200X, etc), but Peter's credibility is ruined, and he can't make more games.
Then either he asks for more credit from his bankers, seeks alternative sources of investment or goes bankrupt. There is no god given right for a business to break even, let alone make a profit.
Intellectual property is not a new idea. It can be traced back several thousand years on the American continent; the Haida and Tlingit peoples of the Pacific northwest have believed for millennia that it's theft to sing another clan's song without permission. The same basic principle is found in the aboriginal cultures of Australia, which have existed essentially unchanged for fifty thousand years or more.
Did these people broadcast or publish their songs? Did they have mechanical recording devices? Did they have publishing corporations who's profits needed protecting at any price? Most importantly, were these songs ever purely entertainment in the first place? Another relevent question is "If clan/tribe A gave clan/tribe B permission to sing their song would A have much say in what B did with the song afterwards? (e.g. if they created a derived work)."
Short version: ideas are work products; exclusive ownership of an idea creates an idea economy; taking an idea without consideration to the idea's owner deprives the owner of value;
"Consideration" can be anything of value. Also you cannot "take" an idea you can only copy it.
ideas have value; value plus scarcity equals property.
Ideas are not physical objects. They can be copied indefinitly... If you want to create a meaningful legal framework for "intellectual property" this needs to be acknowlaged. Rather than pretending, by fiat, that a story, song, drama, etc is a physical item. You might as well pass a law that pi equals 3 or that hydrogen is a liquid at room temperature.
The truth is that these approaches do nothing to redress the playing field. I for one would much rather see the EU state that OEMs and resellers must sell hardware without any preinstalled or bundled operating system.
It would also need something along the lines of the only discounts they can offer being volume discounts. Not exclusivity discounts.
The only way your argument holds up is if you assume that we should abolish intellectual property. Which is as absurd as it is unlikely.
"Intellectual property" is a fiction along the lines of pretending that information is like a physical item. It's actual a fairly recent fiction anyway. What is absurd is treating the idea as though it is underpinned by some physical property or as a legal "sacred cow".
As was the manufacture and sale of alcohol. That didn't stop people making money out of it. As what they were doing was illegal anyway they tended not to care about breaking other laws in the process.
Business models need to adapt. It's the march of technology. The telegraph affected the pony express. The automobile affected the horse and buggy. The ability to copy bits around the planet is going to profoundly affect a lot of things. This does not mean that there is anything wrong with this.
It could well mean that there are new potential business models which take account of this intrinsic attribute of digital data.
In my view, a "corporation" should have no rights of its own. (I'm not even that crazy about the idea of liability avoidance that's supposed to be the whole idea of incorporation, but that's another story.)
This was never ment to mean that the corporation and its agents should not be liable for their own actions. The "limited liability" was originally about protecting investors. With their only liability being the money they had invested. Worst case senario they'd have some scrap paper, but creditors could not expect them to pay debts of the corporation.
I think that when this "war on terrorism" starts winding down, the American people need to sit down with their government and talk about just what their money's being used for.
What makes you think that the "war on (some) terrorism" will wind down? It's closer to the "war on (some) drugs" than the cold war. With an "enemy" who can be repeatedly morphed and reinvented by those in the driving seat.
If a servant in your home refuses to tell you who called on the telephone or who came to the door, you fire him. Why does no one hold governments to the same standard?
Partly because too many citizens don't actually understand that governments and government officials are actually their servants; partly because these entities have spent the last few centuries being sure they are better armed than their "employers" and partly because the impression has been created that elections are the only thing which matter.
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anyhow, if memory serves, the russian shuttle isn't actually better than the US version.
The Russian design is superior to the US design. Higher cargo capacity, better gliding characteristics and less thermal stress in reentry.
The Russian engineers took a look at the US design and improved on several parts of it.
but you're right, the russian shuttle could certainly be used as a cargo carrier..
There would be little point in using the shuttle as a cargo carrier, simply use an Energia booster to put the cargo into orbit.
Of the Buran design, a total of 5 were built. Other than the one was destroyed, 3 are sitting disassembled outside the NPO Molniya factory where they were built, deteriorating in the weather. The remaining one is up for sale, but is *not* in any way a flightworthy vehicle, and absolutely could not have been converted as such in time to save Columbia.
So how long and how much would it cost to get one or more of these flightworthy.
One of the original design goals of the STS was that it would be able to repair satellites in space-- but very few satellite programs have taken advantage of this design feature.
Probably because it's cheaper to launch a replacement satellite. Especially since the shuttle is restricted to low Earth orbit.
Thanks for saying what I already was going to say. I have always been they guy who wants the best tool for the best job. If that was the way things worked with computers, Mainframes would definitely be used for Databases and all IO intensive processes and UNIX/Linux for Calculation intensive stuff and Windows for low end file sharing and print spooling as well as clients.
In quite a few cases the best tool for the job might be a terminal either text or graphics. I've seen quite a few situations where Windows machines do nothing other than run a maximised copy of Hyperterminal.
We're feeling the budget crunch too, and the purchase cost savings of open source is definitely popular with my managers, though they are concerned with "who will support it", well the answer is the same people who would be supporting the "vendor-supported turnkey apps" --- the city's own I.S. staff, because whoever the commercial software's "owner-of-the-day" (the companies are constantly getting bought out by other companies) is generally incompetant anymore.
Especially if you have the senario where your IS staff end up knowing more about the software than the people in the vendor's "hell^Hpdesk" call centre. With open source they actually have the source to examine/alter and typically some contact details for whoever wrote it in the first place.
....but changing over from a commercial vendor to open-source always carries with it a good deal of costs in converting user data, systems, admin training, etc.
As does sticking with a commercial vendor who likes you to "update" according to their schedule.
Strangely, there doesn't seem to be a Linux version. Or a Mac version, either. It's not so free when I'd have to buy a copy of Windows and spend 2 hours installing it, is it?
Also you probably need the "right" version of Windows in order to even insall the "free" MS Office viewer too.
In the cases of floor tilers and aircraft designers- yes!, they should be paid according to the number of people who will benefit from their work.
By that logic the people who worked on aircraft such as the XB-70 and TSR2 should never have been paid anything. With the designers on the Antanov 225 only getting any money for work they did nearly 20 years ago.If I build or design something that no one will ever use, I don't deserve any money at all.
Just because something is usless does not mean that no-one will buy it...
I don't deserve any money at all.
Even if you did it at the request of your employer or persuaded someone to pay you for it.
The more people that want to use it, the more cash I can ask for before agreeing to the job.
The operative word is "before". But no-one knows they actual value of the work until it is done.
The is the fundamental reason that free markets can be more efficient than central planning, because people doing a useless job automatically won't get paid.
How is this efficent? You don't know how much anything costs until long after the event. Also there is a need to keep paying people for work they did decades ago (or even their grandparents did decades ago.)
A "fair price" doesn't mean getting paid by the amount of time or effort put in- it should be the results that matter.
Why should the results matter? Should the person who layed a floor get paid according to the number of people who later walk on it? Should the designer of part of an airliner get paid x amount per passenger?
And, studio recording is a full time job- for somebody. If the "musician" just spends 2 days singing music that has been written, arranged, and accompanied by someone else, though, it's not her who's doing the job. But somebody's working, and needs to be paid.
Considerably more work (and people needing paying) is likely to be involved with even a fairly small concert. PA systems do not magically set themselves up or magically pack themselves away at the end. There is an audience who need to be looked after, kept safe and secure.
Note that I agree that major musicians should not earn as much as they do today from recordings, and that those who want more money should do live shows. But making shows their only means of income just isn't fair.
If they can't make a living from music recordings then maybe they should do something else with their lives.
No, only if the star it was orbiting was losing mass.
This is exactly what stars do. Just that the mass loss, both as "solar wind" and radiation, isn't a large part of their total mass.
It could be a moon that hit Jupiter a long time ago, or some giant crater under the layers of clouds. I bet that there must be a surface structure under those spots.
Impact events only leave signs on gas giants for a fairly short time. It isn't that long since the last time Jupiter got hit.
I think a more interesting question would be as to WHY the atmosphere is being yanked by the star?
The artists impression looks like a large comet. Most likely the atmosphere isn't being "yanked off" so much as erroded by the particles and radiation given off by the star.
There are some musicians who may compose beautiful things in their studios, but can't play in front of a crowd to save their lives. Should they be denied compensation for the music?
They should be paid a fair price for the work they actually do. Touring is more likely to comprise a full time job than doing only studio recordings.
Huge profits for music corporations or artists is not the baseline,
Whilst the music company may make huge profits it certainly isn't the majority of artists. Even supposedly "sucessful" artists have wound up bankrupt, insane or even in early graves.
Why should the music biz, at it now is, be immune from the vagaries of time and change, when whole empires and civilizations aren't?
The multinational music publishing industry isn't even all there is to the "music biz" anyway.
Do you think piracy is going to go away? Do you think that just because the content brokers are out of business, people will decide to give up Kazaa and other pirate-to-pirate (P2P) tools and start paying for their music again?
Without the middlemen taking their cut the actual creator has to sell far fewer copies in order to make a decent living.
Nothing demands that they only sell pre recorded music, they can tour, play gigs, sell t-shirts.
No requirement that people must make a living from making music anyway. For plenty of musicians it's a hobby. Making music and playing gigs is what they do to get away from their "day job". If music can cover the costs of their instraments and get a bit of spare cash that's welcome, but it isn't what motivated them in the first place.
Do you think college kids are going to stop sharing their music collections with anybody who wants to copy them?
They are more likely to pay the artist 50 cents a song than pay 20-30 euros for a CD where they only like a few of the songs (and the artist only gets 5 cents from anyway).
If the government didn't aid businesses sometimes, it could destabilize parts of the economy that they need to stay competitive in the world market.
This is like saying that you don't need welfare, because everyone should never have hard times.
Then why can't government simply say they are enguaging in "corporate welfare" for xyz reason?
Since this is something that's so hard to enforce, the government's just following the path of least resistance.
That would be to do nothing. If government is going to bail out a specific business or business model they need, IMHO, to justify to their employers. That the consequences of not doing so are likely to be worst than doing nothing.
Unlike most physical goods, the fixed startup cost is enough that it is very hard to get into it.
With many physical goods you have to design not only the goods themselves but also machines and systems to produce those goods. Even where you do have costs like movie sets they don't need to be durable enough for hundreds of thousands of uses.
Peter Molyneaux wants gov't support, because Black and White took too long and wasn't bought by enough people. EA may be able to take the write off, since they produce games each year that have profit margins to cover it (NBA Live 200X, etc), but Peter's credibility is ruined, and he can't make more games.
Then either he asks for more credit from his bankers, seeks alternative sources of investment or goes bankrupt. There is no god given right for a business to break even, let alone make a profit.
Intellectual property is not a new idea. It can be traced back several thousand years on the American continent; the Haida and Tlingit peoples of the Pacific northwest have believed for millennia that it's theft to sing another clan's song without permission. The same basic principle is found in the aboriginal cultures of Australia, which have existed essentially unchanged for fifty thousand years or more.
Did these people broadcast or publish their songs? Did they have mechanical recording devices? Did they have publishing corporations who's profits needed protecting at any price? Most importantly, were these songs ever purely entertainment in the first place? Another relevent question is "If clan/tribe A gave clan/tribe B permission to sing their song would A have much say in what B did with the song afterwards? (e.g. if they created a derived work)."
Short version: ideas are work products; exclusive ownership of an idea creates an idea economy; taking an idea without consideration to the idea's owner deprives the owner of value;
"Consideration" can be anything of value. Also you cannot "take" an idea you can only copy it.
ideas have value; value plus scarcity equals property.
Ideas are not physical objects. They can be copied indefinitly... If you want to create a meaningful legal framework for "intellectual property" this needs to be acknowlaged. Rather than pretending, by fiat, that a story, song, drama, etc is a physical item. You might as well pass a law that pi equals 3 or that hydrogen is a liquid at room temperature.
No, Joe User wants a turnkey solution, he doesnt want to deal with installing an OS.
In which case there would be 3 items, hardware, software and the service of installing the latter onto the former.
And if he did, he'd chose the easiest to install. This would be Windows.
Except that this isn't the case for all hardware. Especially once you move away from the home user market.
The truth is that these approaches do nothing to redress the playing field. I for one would much rather see the EU state that OEMs and resellers must sell hardware without any preinstalled or bundled operating system.
It would also need something along the lines of the only discounts they can offer being volume discounts. Not exclusivity discounts.
There are companies that prefer to buy commercially developed software with support, guarantees etc.
Or rather that's what they think they are buying. As opposed to paying someone to tell you to "reboot, reformat, reinstall and upgrade".
The only way your argument holds up is if you assume that we should abolish intellectual property. Which is as absurd as it is unlikely.
"Intellectual property" is a fiction along the lines of pretending that information is like a physical item. It's actual a fairly recent fiction anyway. What is absurd is treating the idea as though it is underpinned by some physical property or as a legal "sacred cow".
Drinking was illegal during prohibition.
As was the manufacture and sale of alcohol. That didn't stop people making money out of it. As what they were doing was illegal anyway they tended not to care about breaking other laws in the process.
Business models need to adapt. It's the march of technology. The telegraph affected the pony express. The automobile affected the horse and buggy. The ability to copy bits around the planet is going to profoundly affect a lot of things. This does not mean that there is anything wrong with this.
It could well mean that there are new potential business models which take account of this intrinsic attribute of digital data.
In my view, a "corporation" should have no rights of its own. (I'm not even that crazy about the idea of liability avoidance that's supposed to be the whole idea of incorporation, but that's another story.)
This was never ment to mean that the corporation and its agents should not be liable for their own actions. The "limited liability" was originally about protecting investors. With their only liability being the money they had invested. Worst case senario they'd have some scrap paper, but creditors could not expect them to pay debts of the corporation.
I think that when this "war on terrorism" starts winding down, the American people need to sit down with their government and talk about just what their money's being used for.
What makes you think that the "war on (some) terrorism" will wind down? It's closer to the "war on (some) drugs" than the cold war. With an "enemy" who can be repeatedly morphed and reinvented by those in the driving seat.
If a servant in your home refuses to tell you who called on the telephone or who came to the door, you fire him. Why does no one hold governments to the same standard?
Partly because too many citizens don't actually understand that governments and government officials are actually their servants; partly because these entities have spent the last few centuries being sure they are better armed than their "employers" and partly because the impression has been created that elections are the only thing which matter.